Widrow's own retrospectives describe Lucky's Bell Labs equalizer as an independently developed, different algorithm, with LMS entering Bell Labs' adaptive-modem work only afterward

In a 2013 Computer History Museum oral history, asked how LMS came to be adopted outside his own lab, Bernard Widrow answered: "there's a man named Robert Lucky who is very famous in the annals of the IEEE... And Lucky developed the adaptive equalizer at Bell Labs. He had developed a learning algorithm, which is different from LMS, and, in my opinion, not as good... But somehow LMS got in there and got into their work on the adaptive modems. And it was the work on adaptive modems at Bell Labs that really caused it to get into digital communications." Asked for a date, Widrow placed it loosely — "probably '65, '66, '67" — and added, of LMS's actual adoption: "When they actually started using LMS? That I'm not sure."

Two other Widrow-authored primaries corroborate the same sequencing. His 2005 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine retrospective states: "Use of the LMS algorithm really took off after the invention of the adaptive equalizer by R.W. Lucky and the adaptive echo canceller by M.M. Londhi [sic — the article's misprint for M.M. Sondhi; the canceller is Sondhi & Presti, "A Self-Adaptive Echo Canceller," BSTJ 45, Dec. 1966] and A.J. Presti at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s." The 1990 Widrow & Lehr Proceedings of the IEEE survey (already on file behind claim-madaline-rule-i-first-layer-trainable-second-fixed) gives the same sequencing from the Stanford side: it credits "outstanding work by Lucky and others at Bell Laboratories" with leading to "major commercial applications of adaptive filters and the LMS algorithm" in high-speed-modem equalization and echo cancellation — LMS arriving at Bell Labs as an applied import. (The survey's "adaptive systems research at Stanford traveled an independent path" sentence, in context, claims independence from the neural-network developments just listed — ART, Hopfield nets, Boltzmann machines — not from Bell Labs specifically, so it corroborates parallel lines only weakly.)

Read together, all three sources place Lucky's original algorithm as distinct from LMS at its 1965 origin, with LMS specifically arriving at Bell Labs as a later graft onto Lucky's independently-invented equalizer (claim-lucky-1965-adaptive-equalizer-steepest-descent-transversal-filter). Every source here is Widrow's own account of his side of the story, spanning 1990–2013 — see claim-lucky-widrow-independent-origination-favored-lucky-side-unverified for what this leaves unaddressed.